If your e-mail address has the form

<firstname.lastname>@su.se

your e-mail account is actually hosted by Stockholm University (if you have an e-mail address in the form <username>@nordita.org, the corresponding account is hosted by KTH — see separate instructions). This means that you always receive and send e-mails via the Stockholm University mail servers, and your e-mail account is part of your Stockholm University computing account.

Which of these methods you choose is a matter of taste and convenience. Webmail is reachable from any computer with internet connection and typically needs no configuration to get started, whereas local e-mail clients of course are only available on the local computer they have been installed on, and they need to be configured to know which mail account to read. On the other hand, the wide variety of (freely downloadable) e-mail clients you can choose between offer a much richer set of advanced tools for working with mail than the typically rather basic webmail systems.

The standard way of configuring local e-mail clients to connect to an e-mail server using a connection standard called IMAP. The Stockholm University e-mail servers are Microsoft Exchange Servers, which means that in addition to IMAP, you can configure your local e-mail client using the Exchange connection standard. It makes no practical difference which of these configuration methods you choose to use, but the Stockholm University IT department recommends you to use the Exchange method. The Exchange configuration option is available on most e-mail clients on computers running either macOS, Linux or Windows. Microsoft's own e-mail client Outlook is one option, but you can use other programs as well with the Exchange configuration, like Apple Mail or Thunderbird.

Read more about E-mail at Stockholm University.

Stockholm University use an Outlook Web App for their web mail services. If you are used to using the standalone e-mail client Outlook many things will be familiar, but the web app has fewer advanced features than the standalone program.

The only configuration you need to make in your e-mail client for it to be able to connect to your mailbox are the specification of

• the server for incoming mail (fetching mails you receive) and
• the server for outgoing mail (handling mails you send),

together with your username and password on these servers. The incoming server is determined on where you have your mail account (in your case Stockholm University), while the outgoing server is associated with the network your computer is connected to.

So on your work computer you would typically configure the local e-mail client to talk to the Stockholm University incoming and outgoing servers, while on your home computer you would still use the Stockholm University incoming server, but must specify the outgoing server supplied by the Internet Provider you have at home. Similarly, if you take your work laptop to some other place than the AlbaNova or Albano campuses, you need to temporarily reconfigure the e-mail client to the outgoing servers used at that place. (All of this is avoided by using webmail when you are traveling).